Administration officials said Iraqi forces are indeed prepared to preserve the nation’s stability.

“One assessment after another about the Iraqi security forces came back saying these guys are ready, these guys are capable, these guys are proven,” Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, told reporters.

Now read today’s New York Times on the disaster that Iraq has become since President Obama cut and ran from the prospect of Maliki becoming a Shia Saddam as the country slides into chaos, divided into three regions, one of which is ISIS-land full of radical jihadis planning strikes, the second a Shia dominated dictatorship , and our fiends the Kurds whom we ought to be helping with every conceivable means but of course are not.

Long after the scandals of Obama’s tenure are thoroughly investigated, catalogued, prosecuted and put down in the minds of Obama uber-loyalists like Eric Holder to racism and to his embarrassed one-time supporters to expressions of the serial incompetencies to which they grew accustomed even as they grew wealthy and powerful, the terrible legacy of his tenure as the worst president of modern times will be the loss of the peace in Iraq.

George W. Bush won the war in Iraq. Barack Obama lost the peace. And the consequences for that country, and ours, will be awful indeed.